It's the hot summer of 1976 in Cumbria when Spencer Little arrives in a small farming community on his bicycle. He's running away from his research student existence at Cambridge for the summer, away from an unpleasant incident and frustrations of his pure maths research that isn't progressing as whe ell as he or his supervisors would like. Living in a shepherd's hut and working on the farm for his keep is certainly different. He strikes a friendship with Alice, the 10-year-old daugher of the farm, and gets unexpectedly close with one of the young men of the village and does his best to stay away from the vicar who is a former Cambridge man and the gossiping village women whose company he finds uncomfortable. It's a good summer but then it doesn't end well.

I enjoyed reading this book, getting into Spencer's life and trying to understand what had brought him to Cumbria. I liked the friendship with Alice, would have loved to have more Dorothy, and found the end pretty devastating although also disappointing in the sense that it seemed to reproduce that old cliché about non-straight characters only being acceptable when things end somehow nastily for them that felt like a let-down after everything. I'm not saying happy endings should be mandatory, how boring and trite would that be, but this one felt simply nasty rather than bleakly realistic. ( )

I was really gripped by this story of Spencer Little, a Cambridge mathematician who spends a summer helping on a farm in the Lake District to try and escape from the social pressures of Cambridge life and give himself some space to make progress with his work. It's set during the 1976 heatwave in the UK; the farm and the countryside are suffering from the dry weather and the heat and despite himself Spencer finds he is getting caught up in the life of the farm and strikes up a friendship with the farmer's ten year old daughter, Alice. The plot is a slow burn but the conclusion, when it comes, is both tragic and chilling. ( )